The expansive story, which substitutes dozens of subplots for the irresistible momentum of The Ice Harvest, couldn’t be more...
Phillips returns to Wichita, Kansas, the scene of the darkly hilarious crimes of The Ice Harvest (2000), to spin out undreamed-of details of what happened long before and long after.
Things have changed for retired cop Gunther Fahnstiel since the night of New Year’s Eve 1978, when he popped up in The Ice Harvest’s finale as the dimwit ex-machina who ended feckless attorney Charlie Arglist’s equally inept crime spree when he and his wife Dot accidentally backed their RV over him. Ten years after struggling with an equally refractory backhoe to bury Charlie’s body in Lester Carswell’s quarry, Gunther’s gone AWOL from the Lake Vista Elder Care Facility in search of the money he found in Charlie’s car and stashed somewhere or other. The news of addled Gunther’s escape draws an unlikely crew of pursuers and investigators to his trail: Ed Dieterle, a retired fellow officer who high-tails it up from Dallas; Gunther’s stepson Sidney McCallum, the bouncer who now runs local strip joint the Sweet Cage; Gunther’s ex-lover Loretta Gandy, who’s hiding a criminal secret of her own; and Dot, still fearful that the cops will get a line on Charlie’s money. A long, looping series of flashbacks to 1952 suggests that Dot’s fears are groundless because there are enough unsolved (often unsuspected) local felonies stretched out to the distant past as far as the eye can see to keep the searchers busy for another three or four volumes—assuming, of course, that the searchers, walkaways all, weren’t too interested in getting drunk and laid ever to find out the truth about anything in Phillips’s topsy-turvy world.
The expansive story, which substitutes dozens of subplots for the irresistible momentum of The Ice Harvest, couldn’t be more different from the chilly anecdote to which it serves as both prequel and sequel. After such a pair of tours de force, it’s hard to imagine what Phillips will come up with next.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44020-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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